If you’ve “been listening just to the Kremlin and the Pentagon,” observes Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, you probably don’t realize “that Russia attacked American forces and their allies in Syria last week, suffering heavy casualties.” The official line is that while Russian “mercenaries” participated in the attack, they “had gone rogue, and Moscow didn’t know anything about it.” That’s why Defense Secretary Jim Mattis expressed his bewilderment at the attack — because acknowledging “the obvious,” that “the Kremlin authorized a direct assault on a US-sponsored base by non-uniformed personnel,” risks “an escalation spiral in Syria.” US officials thus think it’s better to give Vladimir Putin “a chance to back down and deny culpability” — but also quietly say “there is no doubt that the Russian military knew all about the attack.”
Conservative: Gun Solution Requires Serious Trade-Offs

Finding a solution for gun violence can only involve “a trade-off,” says Dan McLaughlin at the Los Angeles Times: “accepting the unacceptable or restricting our freedoms.” Meaning a free press (“publicity gives oxygen to these kinds of acts, so restricting coverage will reduce copycats)”; the right to bear arms (“guns don’t cause human evil, but of course they make it easier to carry out”) and due process (“targeting potential mass shooters . . . requires us to curtail Americans’ civil rights before they have actually committed a crime”). The answers are only easy “if you are willing to sacrifice rights you don’t care about, [but] that other people do.” So “we have to acknowledge the nature of the choice before us: punish many innocent people or remain mostly defenseless against the malicious few.”
Political scribe: Schumer Can’t Win on Immigration

Senate Democrats are giving Chuck Schumer “plenty of side-eye” over immigration, reports Time’s Philip Elliott. Indeed, “there is a strained patience” with the minority leader, who “traded away immigration for a broader spending bill.” And while legislators understand his strategy, they have “deep fears” about their “party’s loudest voices.” The Dems’ “energized left flank . . . wants a big deal, while pragmatists closer to the center want to focus on the immediate task of the Dreamers.” But a comprehensive deal is “too ambitious to chase with so little time and even less support for a big deal in the more conservative House.” Yet if “activists and donors sour on the Democrats in February, the climb to victories this November will get steeper.”
Reporter: The Real Reason Romney’s Running

As expected, Mitt Romney on Thursday announced his candidacy for the US Senate from Utah. That actually makes him something of a carpetbagger, reports The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, given that he was raised in Michigan and spent most of his adult life in Massachusetts. But he has since become “a full-throated pitchman for his adoptive home state — making the case that Utah’s distinctive brand of conservatism could offer a better way forward for the GOP and the nation.” Indeed, he’s “a true believer in the Utah model of governance — and he plans to make it a central theme of his campaign.” Meaning “he will champion a brand of Republicanism that he believes could be the antidote to Trumpism.”
From the right: Millions for Graffiti Makes It Uncool

Last November, a jury decided that the destruction of “an impermanent high-art graffiti gallery” in Queens violated a 1990 copyright law. Like many others, Alice Lloyd at The Weekly Standard was astonished by the “staggering” damages awarded this week by a judge, who imposed “the maximum damages possible and the largest sum ever awarded” for a violation of that law — “nearly $7 million” against building owner Jerry Wolkoff for the “crime of whitewashing his own walls.” This for “an art form still technically rooted in trespassing.” But what was once a crime has now become “a commercial strategy” — businesses see graffiti adding the “edge of underground vogue to a bland building.” However, asks Lloyd, “doesn’t the profit-conscious carefulness that comes with a commercialist embrace risk making the art itself, well, bland?”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann